THIS week’s national polls tell a fascinating and unexpected story. The president’s approval ratings should have tanked owing to the conversion of the political news into the “Richard Clarke Show.”

Instead, according to the Pew poll, “A week’s worth of criticism of his pre-9/11 record on terrorism has had little impact on President Bush’s support among voters.”

Gallup’s results say pretty much the same thing. And they also indicate that Bush has significantly improved his standing in relation to John Kerry. Indeed, the big story in the Gallup poll is that Bush’s political advertising has helped cause Kerry’s positive numbers to drop precipitously over the past few weeks.

How can this be? It seemed inevitable that last week’s 9/11 hearings and the media’s relentless efforts to publicize Clarke’s patently dishonest charges against the administration were going to hurt Bush badly. Something interesting is going on here – or rather, two interesting things are going on.

The first might be called “Bush Attack Fatigue.”

The assaults against the president have been so constant for so many months – on every subject under the sun from his handling of the economy to the war in Iraq and now to the War on Terror – that a law of diminishing returns has set in. The people willing to believe the worst of George W. Bush have already gotten the message. The people who like him have tuned out the liberal criticism. And everybody else is just sick of the negativity.

Clarke’s effort to recast the events before and after 9/11 in a fashion almost entirely unfavorable to the president has made him famous and rich. He has been embraced by the Michael Moore-Al Franken crowd, and has been canonized by a liberal media that has basically decided it will do whatever it can to prevent Bush’s re-election.

But the very fact that Clarke’s criticisms are so patently over the top and false – like suggesting his boss, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, had never heard of al Qaeda before he mentioned the organization to her – has limited his book’s political effectiveness. Had he been more judicious in his criticisms of the president, they might have been more wounding.

The hysterical tone of Clarke’s “Against All Enemies” and his absurd claim that he fears the White House is seeking to “destroy” him – this from a man who stands to make as much as $5 million to $10 million on this book alone – means that he has surrendered the possibility of talking to the great American middle.

Ordinary Americans of all political leanings remember vividly the days after 9/11 (it was, after all, only 31 months ago) and formed a pretty solid opinion of Bush’s handling of the matter that won’t be shaken so easily by Clarke’s score-settling and profiteering.

The second factor helping the president is the nature of the 9/11 hearings themselves. There’s something about congressional inquiries that just get people’s hackles up. The grandstanding of committee members, the discomfort of the witnesses and the way everybody drones on for hours make it all seem a bit unseemly.

This has happened time and time again whenever there are high-level inquiries involving the executive branch. The Iran-Contra hearings boomeranged on those who believed they would destroy the Reagan administration. And of course the Whitewater and Lewinsky proceedings before Congress backfired on Republicans, who were lucky to escape the 1998 elections with their majorities in the House and Senate intact.

It’s entirely possible that the president’s decision to allow Rice to testify in public and under oath before the commission was a decision made not out of panic, but out of confidence.

Surely by this point the incredibly flush Bush re-election campaign is doing nightly tracking polls for its own private use. The White House may have discovered late last week that despite Clarke’s nastiness, the public retains a very strong positive opinion of Condi Rice (50 percent favorable, 25 percent unfavorable, according to Gallup).

Given the inability of Democrats on the 9/11 Commission to take the administration down last week, political prudence dictated the new course. The only distressing number for the administration in the current polling is that 53 percent of Americans surveyed by Gallup think Bush & Co. were hiding something about 9/11 – largely because Rice wouldn’t testify in public and under oath.

The administration never had anything to hide on the subject except for sensitive intelligence information. But what the current polls surprisingly suggest is that politically, Bush doesn’t have much to fear either – and might even have something to gain – from the whole unfortunate process.

Wouldn’t it be delicious if Richard Clarke’s book helps get Bush re-elected?